Our work has made us well aware of the pervasive presence of torture within the country’s criminal justice system. For the ‘Death Penalty India Report’ (2016), we spoke to 155 death row prisoners about their experience of custodial violence. 128 said they had been tortured in police custody. One of them, Inder, says: “When anyone is tortured like I was, it no longer matters whether you did it or not, you will agree to anything to make [it] stop.” In the opinion study we conducted with former Supreme Court judges, 38 of the 39 who discussed torture stated it was rampant across the system. Our ethnographic study of magistrate courts across Delhi revealed how checkpoints and pathways to accountability that are supposed to prevent custodial violence have routinely failed. Our support of longform reporting aims to map the challenges for communities pursuing accountability in cases of custodial death.